


(pretty) bitchin'

by biscuitswrites



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Character Development, Eleven | Jane Hopper Deserves Happiness, Good Parent Joyce Byers, Grief/Mourning, Siblings Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, jim hopper is still dead sorry, specifically carachter developpment that isnt about boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:40:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27554764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biscuitswrites/pseuds/biscuitswrites
Summary: Eleven and her relationship with fashion!Or, Eleven and character development that isn't about Mike.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper
Kudos: 16





	(pretty) bitchin'

El keeps trying to find her style after she moves away from Hawkins. There's no malls, no brightly coloured neons, but there's thrift shops, which is all Joyce can really afford, trying to feed three kids instead of two. She passes by an old timey dress hanging in a window, (she doesn’t like dresses, they’re hard to fight in, to run in) but she likes the pattern. She mutters “Pretty” under her breath and keeps walking. 

After her dad died, there wasn’t room for much. Everything was clouded and muted by memories and pain. She remembers the first time she felt something like pure happiness, not bittersweet memories, not the echo of it, just teenagered happiness that wasn’t laden with guilt of how can you be happy when hes gone. She found it in a pile of clothes Max had left for her, with the note, “Keep trying to find your style.” She looks through the box, and some of the colours make something click right in her brain and she stares at them for a while, the patterns blending together, tracing her fingers over creases and lines. Some of the colours look hideous to her, and she can’t really say why, other than the colours are just wrong. She keeps them all though, because ugly or not, they all smell like Max, like shampoo and sweat and wind. 

El remembers the first time she had worn anything that wasn’t from hawkins lab, that huge yellow shirt the chef had given to her, scared and shivering at his door. It had been soft, and it smelled like grease and safety. She sees a huge sweater the exact same shade of yellow, (of sunshine and happiness and summer picnics), and she can’t explain to Will why her eyes are filled with tears. She can’t explain to herself why she cries even harder when Joyce buys it for her. She wears it to bed every night and at the breakfast table every morning, but it smells like eggos and cheap laundry detergent, and it still smells safe. 

She likes socks. She notices them, a lot, partly because it’s still so hard to make eye contact. There’s so much you can learn from the lines of people’s faces, she doesn’t understand how people can look at each other all day long without flinching. So she opts to stare at people’s feet, at their shoes, at their socks. She remembers the pattern on the socks Mike had given her, if only because she liked those colours together so so much. Blue and yellow and green were her favourite colours, even if she still couldn’t articulate why. (That’s okay, Joyce had told her. No one really knows why.) And socks are slightly cheaper than clothes. So that’s where her “Fashion renaissance” as Jonathan had jokingly called it, started.  
Her favourite ones had little stars on them, and she wore them as often as she could get away with without Joyce laughing and going, “Those could walk on their own, let me throw them in the wash.” 

She has an impressive collection of flannels from her dad. Some of them still smell a little bit like pine needles, her dad’s cologne and cigarette smoke. (She never tells Joyce that when she smokes at midnight, she wakes up crying, expecting her dad to be coming in late with an apology and a cigarette both dangling from his lips.) Even when she had still been in Hawkins, she retired from her small amount of bright clothes from her one shopping trip to wear the worn down button ups, and Max had tsked with a little bit of sadness in her eyes, before pulling her by the hand to show her how to style them a little bit more. “You want to feel close to him yeah?” El had nodded. “You can feel close to him and still spice it up a bit, you know? Add a little flair?” El thought about Max wearing jean jackets, leather jackets too big for her and proudly calling it “a look” every time someone pointed it out, thought about the way her hands had fiddled with the hem and the way she folded them like they were precious, (because maybe they were). She thought about all of it as Max tied up the ends of her shirt with tears in her eyes and said, “Yes him, but still you”  
Every time she puts on one of his button ups, she’s reminded of him, but she can also hear Max behind her, asking her to twirl, and so sometimes she does, all alone in her room twirling in front of the mirror for no one but herself and she looks up and think pretty, and for the first time she thinks Max is wrong, style isn’t yours, it’s everyone’s who’s ever impacted you. It’s, “Still them, but still you.” 

El sort of hates how she looks. It’s not her face, it’s not her curves, she still can’t really understand why people care about those sorts of things, but it’s the way she dresses, because she never really knows how. Max was right, she always dressed how other people wanted her to, but partly because she didn’t know how she wanted to, and when she wore things she thought she did, everyone proved her wrong. Her main way of learning how to function in the new world she’s been thrown into was to copy and imitate, and finding something uniquely hers was hard. She needed validation from other people, needed to know, “Is this how this works?” because she can’t answer the question herself.  
Finding a good in between was difficult, to say the least. She started going to school in her new town, and girls were always talking about looks and styles. She tries to quote something Max said once, some silly thing about stripes and patterns, but everyone chimed in with a chorus of, “So last year sweetie,” in high sticky voices and so she stopped.  
Eventually she stops caring though, stops trying to be what people want her to be, and finds the thin fine line between inspiration and imitation. 

Girls at school have started commenting on the bags underneath her eyes, on her lack of makeup. “Your skins so clear, you don’t need it, but some blush might do you some good.” Blush, mascara, it’s all lost on her, but she remembers something Kali said once while she was getting her makeover.  
“Eyeliner, hold still and close your eyes.” She had mumbled. The pencil hadn’t tickled, but it had been a weird sensation, to have someone colouring your eye.  
“It’ll make you look more intimidating, ya know?” El really didn’t know, but she was learning that she didn’t know much at all, so she nodded. “People can’t really see the fear in your eyes, tiredness, all they can see is intensity,”  
She had only looked at herself once in the mirror while she had been wearing it, but it had been pretty bitchin’. So she asks Joyce one day at the dinner table.  
“Eyeliner?” she mumbled and Will looks up from his potatoes at that, rolling his hands over, their signal for, “Elaborate?” El sighs.  
“Do you, do you have eyeliner?” Joyce smiles a bit, a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth.  
“Sure sweetie. Maybe instead of more socks we can get you your own this week, but until then, you can use mine. Okay?” Joyce is already leaving the table, potatoes going cold on her plate as she reaches out a hand to her. Eleven takes it, trailing her to the washroom.  
She pulls something out of the back of the cupboard, a little black pen.  
“Do you want to try it now?” Eleven hates the patience in her voice but at the same time, is thankful for it. She has no idea where she would be without this woman.  
“I think so. I think I need to see how it looks.” I need to see whether I’ve finally found something thats me, or whether I’m just doing what I’m told, She thinks.  
“Well in that case, want me to do it for you, or do you think you can handle yourself?”  
“I can handle myself.”  
“Okay, sweetheart.” with a smile and a softly shut door, she’s gone. Eleven takes a deep breath, and with only slightly shaky hands, manages to do both eyes herself. Kali’s voice is telling her what to do in her head, to tilt her chin that way, even it out there. By the end it’s shaky and uneven, but it’s bitchin’. And Kali was right, she doesn’t look tired or scared, all she can see is big brown eyes. This feels like me. And she laughs at herself in the mirror.  
“Will!” she calls.  
He comes in immediately, startled by an Eleven crying with laughter on the bathroom floor.  
“How do I look?” She sniffles.  
Will grins at her joy for a few seconds before thinking about his answer. “Hm. El, I’d say, you look happier than you’ve been in a long time, and that’s most of what matters yeah? You don’t look your best, but that’s probably because this eyeliner is decidedly not waterproof.” He giggles a little bit at her racoon eyes and the black streaming down her face before he’s tackled with a bear hug.  
That weekend, Eleven gets her very own eyeliner pencil.

**Author's Note:**

> as much as el grows without mike in s3, he was still a huge part of her growth. and yeah, they mean a lot to each other, but it was starting to piss me off. mileven is a rlly cute ship, but theyre more than each other :)


End file.
